


White

by heart0fdarkness



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: M/M, Mental Health Issues, Physical Abuse, Post-Canon, Recovery, Violence, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 09:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20374609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heart0fdarkness/pseuds/heart0fdarkness
Summary: Hallucinations.He says they will pass, like everything else.Like the inability to line up words and walk straight without tripping up and getting hurt.Like the memory lapses and the blackouts.Like the emptiness.[Riko Moriyama wakes up in a white hospital room.]





	White

**Author's Note:**

> English is clearly not my first language and everything about what I write in it looks terrible. I apologize in advance, but I felt the urge to start writing short stories about Riko Moriyama and Italy doesn’t really have an AFTG fandom. Anyway, I’m about to give you the same old rap, which is almost tiring sometimes. Do I condemn Riko’s actions? Yes. Do I think he was evil and needed to pay for what he did? Yes.  
And yet there is so much more to say about him. I am naturally driven towards broken things, broken people and broken souls. I want to know what destroyed them; I want to think there’s always, always a better way to fix them, instead of throwing them away.  
Just a quick disclaimer: there’re mentions of mental illness and physical abuse in this one-shot. If you feel like this might affect you, please, don’t read.

**WHITE -**

_Till human voices wake us, and we drown. –_

_T.S.Eliot_

His hospital room is sterile and bare, with no clean shirts or rackets or leather gloves to make it anyway familiar. There are no windows, no keys on the doors, no hooks, no chandeliers to hang from or to be hung by.

Most importantly, his hospital room is white. That is the worst part. Riko feels surrounded, as if the lack of depth and the whiteness of the walls can make them shrink like a cast of cement around his bones.

_White._

Sometimes he sees spots of red and black on the periphery of his field of vision, but the neurologist says those are desertions produced by his blood-soaked cerebral cortex. Phosphenes. _Hallucinations._

He says they will pass, like everything else.

Like the inability to line up words and walk straight without tripping up and getting hurt. Like the memory lapses. Just like the emptiness.

He is also the one who informed Riko about what happened to his brain, about the way the bullet that pierced his skull was finally extracted. The doctor didn’t say a word about his prognosis, though, but Riko doesn’t dare to ask.

He listens carefully, then looks at the white of the man’s coat and the white of the bag connected to the IV in his left arm and again tries to remember things. What day it is. Where is this place. What’s the name on the tag the neurologist wears around his neck.

Riko can't read.

He can't do anything, really.

He would get out of here If he could, but no one except doctors and nurses and physiotherapists ever enter his colorless room to help him stand up.

\- Riko, you shot yourself because you couldn't stand the idea of defeat. Is that so?

_No._

He mimics his lips to speak but no sound comes out of his peeling mouth. What he does then is shake his head slowly. He feels no pain. On the outside, he doesn’t even feel anything.

_Morphine, _he realizes.

That helps.

\- It is. Your medical record has been delivered two days ago, Riko. You haven’t been taking your mood stabilizer for four weeks. Do you know what that means?

_No._

Riko didn't even know he ever swallowed one of those meds, nor that Edgard Allan's medical team had diagnosed him with a personality disorder.

Type B, _borderline. _

He will ask for explanations to Tetsuji at the cost of having the Master’s stick broken on his back. Or his back broken on the stick. But his uncle never comes to see him anyway. No one does, not a teammate, nor a single one of his sponsors and time dilates so much that the clock seems to swallow him whole.

The first time Riko Moriyama manages to detach his dehydrated lips to speak, it is as if the words were locked behind the thin border between his tongue and the outside world. He tries so hard, but letters won’t come out.

\- One at a time, - says the Doctor.

Riko swallows.

\- Brother.

\- My brother. Was he -

_Was he here before I woke up?_

The man approaches a faded plastic chair in front of his bed, shaking his head.

\- None of our health workers has ever been contacted by Ichirou Moriyama or his spokesmen after your arrival to the hospital. I'm sorry.

Riko's eyes sting like pins. He doesn’t care. But he remembers his brother's hand on his cheek just before the shot, warm and delicate, Ichirou’s thumb grazing his protruding cheekbone.

Riko pretends he never really cared.

He closes his fingers around the edge of the bed and the beep of his heartbeat accelerates dangerously on the monitors inside of his room.

\- Who? - he asks but does not know how to proceed. For the first time in his life Riko has no idea what to do, what to say, how to breathe. Before all of this, there were only Exy’s rules, prohibitions and consequences. Right now, every second looks like a leap into the void.

\- Who brought you here?

The doctor reaches out a hand to his but Riko moves it in a lightning shot he didn't think he was still capable of. He doesn't want to be touched. But he dies of desire that someone finally will.

\- The same person who has taken charge of your health costs, - he confesses.

And Riko’s sight betrays him again, this time in the subtlest way. Everything is white until it turns white and orange, when a tall man with tattoos on his forearms enters his room without knocking.

There is the paw of a fox on his tight t-shirt.

He is the first person to visit him since he came out of the coma.

\- Mr. Waymack, - the neurologist says, standing up to greet him - I was just informing the boy.

Riko feels like dying or killing somebody, but all at once he can't move. Kevin fucking Day's father looks at him with the same intensity his son reserved Riko before fighting him or covering him in kisses.

\- I came for the bird that fell from the nest, - he announces.

Then he points at _him._

**Author's Note:**

> More notes: what if Riko Moriyama had survived the headshot? Something tells me that wouldn’t be his brother’s merit. But Waymack likes broken things as much as I do, so… maybe he decided to at least try.  
I suck at writing fanfiction and this is my way to beg someone to post more works about the Moriyama, thank you very much, bye.


End file.
